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“Words can get you killed,” explains Ameena. She is one of the violence interrupters who walk through Chicago’s most violent neighborhoods. She and the other interrupters walk through a world that is as foreign to middle class America as any passport destination. They cool down arguments, insert themselves into brewing storms. Billed as a documentary […]

Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, has been a phenomenal success in a way that few academic works ever achieve. It has had a steady presence on the arbiter of successful books – the New York Times bestseller list. Why is it so popular? Because it tells the […]

Conspicuously absent from all of the Muffingate coverage was a basic understanding of how hotel conference costs work. Hotels negotiate Package deals that typically include room blocks, catering, and meeting room space. Paying for these features a la carte is just not done. So when Laurie Robinson handed down the food and beverage prohibition, agencies […]

At the recent NIJ conference, Joan Petersilia served as the keynote speaker. Petersilia’s work is well known throughout the field, and her long experience as a criminologist makes her uniquely suited to comment on the issue of reducing incarceration. Petersilia, who was given free reign in her discussion topic, contextualized the current move to reduce […]

Whenever you don’t know what to do with your spare time, you know you find yourself searching for big name criminologists on YouTube. No? Just me? Well, okay then. I’ll help out. Here’s a quick vid of Robert Agnew talking about his background, career, and work on general strain theory. Feel free to post your […]

A 2005 article that appeared in The Criminologist was titled, “It ain’t happening here: Working to understand prison rape.” Although I had spent some time working in correctional facilities at that point, I still labored under the popular myth that sexual assaults in prison were absolutely ubiquitous. Kreinert and Fleisher’s article taught me otherwise, and […]

“When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the […]